About

Shifting Realms is a game of colliding worlds. Five worlds are included, Alfheim, Tyrfing, Dovre, Libertatia and Anunna, each unique in board layout, structures, story cards, tasks, and end conditions. To set up the game, three worlds are selected at random, then players take actions until two out of the three worlds' end conditions are met, at which point the game ends.
During the game, players send out scouts to collect resources, recruit soldiers to protect their scouts, build structures to gain powers, and earn victory points. Story cards and individual tasks add intrigue and complexity to gameplay.

Jeff is playing with a prototype. Actual game does not come with card sleeves. Shifting Realms does come with the dragon figure not shown in the video.

Risks and challenges

When creating a game, the one factor we at Soaring Rhino will stand by is gameplay. Before we spent one penny on art for Shifting Realms, we repeatedly tested and tweaked the gameplay. If we design a game that players do not want to play over and over than we will leave it on the shelf.

Getting Shifting Realms to the fun strategic level it is now, wasn't easy. Even with over twenty years game design experience, it took time, more time than we anticipated. We are happy to say that it is thoroughly tested and we have the first expansion which introduces three more realms well underway. We have been testing all eight realms for about six months. We designed all 8 realms and then picked the five we wanted to include in the first game.

There are many other challenges. Here are several we have encountered:

Knowing what to do, how to do it and who to contact- Colby Dauch from Plaid Hat Games helped us out right from the beginning. He is our mentor and he answered all of our many questions about starting up and running a game company. He was the one who helped us make the decision to start hiring artists. Thanks Colby!

Creating all of the artwork-
When I first started working on the art for Shifting Realms, I thought it would be fun to create all the art myself, this is Craig Van Ness. I started with the gameboard spaces. I created art for all the spaces needed for the gameboard except the town hall spaces. Then I painted up elf cards and the priest structures and wow did it take me much longer to complete then I anticipated. We quickly made the decision to higher an artist. John Ariosa, who worked on Summoner Wars and Mice and Mystics was available, which we were super happy about. We commissioned him to finish the art for the game. For the Shifting Realms logo we hired Jason Taylor and we got to work with Pilot to create our company logo!

Selecting a manufacturing partner- Happy to say we have selected one, it is Grand Prix International. The folks at GPI have been great to work with. Making sure your game is priced correctly and at the same time delivers a good value is key. GPI was very helpful with running different costs with different contents and materials to get the final product offering we have today.

Selecting a fulfillment partner- We are currently having conversations with fulfillment partners.

We are confident that we can overcome all challenges. We are very happy with our first game from Soaring Rhino, Shifting Realms. We hope you will be too!